Thursday, October 24, 2013

Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking.

I usually don't feel smart and smarter
unless I'm criticizing someone or
something--exercising the power of my
negative thinking, but when I don't (feel
like feeling smart), I express the power
of my positive thinking::

apple pie and motherhood,
yellow lab puppies and small
kittens, good thoughts from
wise people, public prayers
and personal testimonials,
sunrises and sunsets, small
children in Halloween get-up,
a white horse grazing in a
pasture, hugs, smiles, early
Holiday Sales, new car smell,
"A" papers posted on the
refrigerator door, completed
college applications, gluten
free muffins, autumn leaves
and windy afternoons, Zero
Calorie Coca Cola and Pepsi
Max, dreams of a common
language: S'Allgood and all is
well and all is well and all
manner of things is well.

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I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by athief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow,squeezing off a couple of rounds and sendingthe burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons offamily notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down toPhiladelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him.She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-itwould have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY butINSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville